‘Hot Girls Wanted’ Documentary Picked Up By Netflix

Sundance-Rashida-Jones-Hot-Girls-Wanted
Image via YouTube

Hot Girls Wanted, an independent film documentary produced by Rashida Jones and directed by Ronna Gradus and Jill Bauer of Sexy Baby fame, premiered Saturday, January 24, at the Sundance Film Festival. Netflix bought rights to the film very soon after despite mixed reviews.

The film focuses on young girls who are lured into the falsely named “amateur porn” business which is shot and produced by the big-business porn studios. As the Standard Examiner wrote, the exploitation of these women soon follows:

Tressa, an 18-year-old girl featured in the film, was attracted to porn as a way to escape her Texas hometown. She said she earned $25,000 in her four months in the industry, but after paying for lingerie, manicures, makeup and biweekly STD tests, she only had about $2,000 in her bank account when she quit the business.

Gradus and Bauer follow their 2012 documentary?Sexy Baby,?which explores the porn industry’s exploitation of children, with a look at?the effects of a booming porn industry on other?victims. In this case, it’s the newly adult stars. The women featured in the documentary describe their initial success at earning fast cash and temporary fame only to be shuffled along as a?sea of fresh faces are recruited endlessly, leaving the former hopeful stars with little to show except for a past that haunts them while they deal with the effects on their relationships and their futures.

The Hollywood Reporter praised the film, stating that:

“Bauer and Gradus up the ante with intermittent rapid-fire, fair-use montages, nimbly cut by screenwriter-editor-producer Brittany Huckabee, that illustrate not just the broader world of online porn but also the highly sexualized culture teenagers are immersed in these days, bombarded every day with media coverage of Rihanna’s nipples, Kim Kardashian’s ass or Nicki Minaj’s twerking skills.”

Other reviews, such as Vice, decries the heavy-handed blame of the porn industry as creating a sexually-obsessed culture that devalues women instead of looking at the culture that creates such a demand for porn that includes scenes of force and violence with an endless stream of new, young girls.

“Rather than explore how pornography might reflect society rather than shape it, they point to porn as the cause of societal ills. Bauer, for one, thinks that this leads to sexual assault.”

The documentary will be released on Netflix later in 2015.

 

Watch an interview with Jones and the film’s directors below.